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According to a
study published in Urology, those trained with the Fundamental
Skills of Robotic Surgery curriculum demonstrated greater precision
in surgical skills than those who did not receive training.

Training Simulator Developed in Buffalo

RoSS was developed by two of the curriculum study researchers:
senior author Khurshid A. Guru, MD, who directs robotic surgery
at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center (RPCCC), and
co-author Thenkurussi Kesavadas, PhD, who directs UB’s Virtual Reality Lab and is
a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Training Improves Surgical Skills

Recruited from UB, RPCI, the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit
and the Cleveland Clinic, 53 surgeons, fellows, residents and
medical students participated in the study. Most had no prior
robotic or laparoscopic surgical experience.

Initially, an experimental group completed the four-hour
training course while a control group did not.

When tested on the da Vinci system, the trained group performed
three tasks with more precision and speed than the control
group.

Twenty-three control participants then also completed the
training. When they were re-tested on the same tasks, their average
performance improved considerably.

The researchers now plan further study to establish the extent
to which their robotic surgery curriculum may affect long-term
surgical proficiency.

Pioneering Crucial, Simulated Training

Already, this pioneering curriculum “is being used in many
leading robotic surgery training programs nationally and
internationally,” says Kesavadas.

Guru notes it is “critically important” to have
training programs that realistically simulate the surgical
environment and build user proficiency in core skills.

This study “gives us the first evidence that a carefully
designed, structured training curriculum carried out in a
risk-free, simulated environment is an effective way to translate
the basic skills required in robot-assisted surgery,” he
says.

“The implications for improvements in patient safety and
long-term outcomes are tremendously encouraging.”

Health Researchers

Daniel
Kosman, PhD, studies how organisms acquire and metabolize iron
and copper, intrinsically toxic metals essential to cellular
respiration and oxygen transport. One of his goals is to develop
antifungal drugs to treat infections in humans.

Thomas
Russo, MD, is internationally known for his work with strains
of E. coli that cause infections outside the intestine and result
in morbidity worldwide due to pneumonia, urinary tract infections
and meningitis.

Suzanne
Laychock, PhD, is investigating the cellular mechanisms
regulating insulin secretion in pancreatic cells. Her group has
used pancreatic cells in primary culture to develop in vitro
systems that mimic aspects of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

Te-Chung
Lee, PhD, demonstrated for the first time, in an animal model,
that injecting adult bone marrow stem cells into skeletal muscle
can repair cardiac tissue, reversing heart failure. He and his team
showed that this non-invasive procedure increased heart cells
two-fold.

Rajendram
Rajnarayanan, PhD, studies interactomes of the human estrogen
receptor, which is expressed in 70 percent of breast cancers. His
lab seeks to design molecules to improve the effects of
tamoxifen, a drug commonly prescribed to treat breast cancer.

Gabriela
Popescu, PhD, is studying NMDA receptors in the brain, which
are involved in synaptic development, plasticity, memory and
learning, as well as in pathologies such as stroke,
neurodegeneration, chronic pain, addiction, schizophrenia and
epilepsy.

Mulchand
Patel, PhD, is a specialist in nutritional biochemistry. He
found that fetuses of obese mother rats were programmed in utero to
develop obesity in adulthood, and was the first to show that this
metabolic programming occurs in the fetal hypothalamus.

James
R. Olson, PhD, has traveled to Egypt to work with cotton
laborers exposed to pesticides. His research links genetics, an
individual’s degree of exposure to pesticides and effects on
health, seeking to improve workplace and environmental health
worldwide.

Michael
Garrick, PhD, identified the first protein essential for normal
intestinal iron absorption and the first mammalian iron transporter
to be characterized at the molecular level. His work provides a
major step forward in the understanding of iron metabolism.